The Fox's Walk (31 page)

Rosamund Gwynne was about thirty, far too old, it seemed to me, to be engaged to anyone. Had I considered it, I would have realized that she would be the same age as Mrs. Bryce and also that Unde Hubert, a widower, was not of an age to marry a debutante. Miss Gwynne, the woman I was apparently to start thinking of as an aunt, was quite pretty—later I would hear her described unfairly as “chocolate-boxy”—but she was devoid of any of the feminine qualities I found attractive or admirable. I studied her during lunch—not an easy task, since, when I allowed my eyes to creep in her direction, I often found her looking at me, only, it seemed, to find me lacking. I studied her in order to be able to describe her to my family and to understand what it was that I found unlikable. The first and most obvious reason was that I could sense Rosamund Gwynne did not like me. Why, I wondered. Had Mrs. Bryce perhaps said something? Or was the antipathy predestined, mutual, and instinctive? And what was it exactly that I didn't care for? She wasn't soft or tender like my mother, and her voice wasn't gentle; she wasn't vulnerable or exotic, emotional or affectionate, like Sonia; she wasn't straight and noble and admirable like Grandmother or maternal like Aunt Katie. I thought of Bridie, of Mara, even of Mrs. Coughlan, and knew I would have welcomed one or all of them into my family rather than this interloper who was talking not quite comfortably to Mrs. Bryce.

Miss Kingsley, Clodagh, and I remained silent while the conversation between Mrs. Bryce and Miss Gwynne passed from a dull exchange of memories of girls with whom they had been at school to, inevitably, the war. By the time we had finished our shepherd's pie, Miss Gwynne had mentioned the dangerous and painful word “conscription.” I saw Mrs. Bryce look at the maid who was setting the rice pudding and stewed plums on the serving table, and I was pleased to see that Miss Gwynne's views, with which I knew her to agree, were causing her discomfort.

“Unmarried men in England have to go. I don't see why Irishmen shouldn't, too. We're all in it together.”

Irishmen were not being conscripted, but, while Miss Gwynne was outraged that they were exempt, there was widespread and dangerous anger at the prospect that they might be, and the possibility had led to a new spirit of cooperation between the various nationalist factions. My family believed, as did many others, that conscription was not only likely if the war continued, but that the introduction could lead to a popular revolution.

The maid's face was expressionless; it was impossible to know what she thought or where her family stood politically. The war had made Ireland more prosperous, and farmers who supplied food and wool to England were better off than they had ever before been. Her family might be nationalist and among those the government feared might revolt if conscription were introduced, or they might be prosperous loyalists, perhaps with a son serving in France. I wondered how O'Neill felt, and I remembered the tense moment between him and Nicholas Rowe outside the pub the day of the meet at Herald's Cross. I thought also of the maids telling me that Irish soldiers were more likely to be sent to certain death at the most dangerous parts of the front than were their English counterparts. I thought of Unde William's anger at what he considered Kitchener's stupidity in refusing to form specifically Southern Irish regiments.

“Pas devant
..." Mrs. Bryce said faintly, nervously fingering her pearls.

Miss Gwynne looked at her, surprised and, it seemed, not quite sure that she wanted to be interrupted.

"
Pas devant les enfants ou les domestiques,”
Miss Kingsley said pleasantly.

There was a moment of silence while the maid closed the door behind her and while I looked at my place mat. No one had risen from the table to help herself to pudding.

Miss Kingsley continued in the same pleasant conversational tone, still in French: just a couple of sentences—she knew and they knew she knew it—that no one else at the table understood. The only word I recognized was “mademoiselle,” but, since my vocabulary was limited to simple descriptions of the domestic life of middle-class mice, it would have been unreasonable to have expected more. For good measure she finished with a smiling,
“N'est-ce pas?“
Another silence ensued before Mrs. Bryce spoke.

“Rosamund,” she said. “Rice pudding? And plums. From the old tree at the bottom of the garden. I bottled them myself.”

 

“
SHE ASKED ME
to call her Aunt Rosamund.”

“‘She,' Alice?” Grandmother asked.

“Miss Gwynne asked me to call her Aunt Rosamund.” I thought it unfair that Grandmother should treat me as a child while benefiting from my almost adult reporting skills. At the same time I was grateful she hadn't asked, as my schoolmistress in London used to, “Who's ‘she'? The cat's mother?”

“I don't think that's a very good idea,” Grandmother said.

I hadn't thought she would. I didn't think it a very good idea myself.

“So what should I call her?” I allowed a note of weariness, not entirely simulated, to creep into my voice.

“Perhaps you should continue to call her Miss Gwynne, at least until we know her better.”

Grandmother's words condemned me to the inconvenience of never addressing Miss Gwynne by name and confirmed my assumption that Uncle Hubert had not been heard from and that my mother had neither remembered any further telling details nor had she added anything that had gained importance in translation at Ballydavid.

“We should ask her to lunch on Sunday,” Aunt Katie said. I could see that she was retreating into the reassuring world of food and domestic arrangements. “And the Bryces, of course.”

Grandmother allowed her eyes to close for a moment, and I saw Aunt Katie flick a glance at Sonia. Sonia sat, as she now did all the time, in a corner of the sofa. She seemed to have become each day a little smaller and more bedraggled, like a bird losing its plumage. She had said nothing since I had come home, but she followed the conversation with interest. Now she began to cough and held a handkerchief to her face. After a moment, still coughing, she left the room. Uncle William, who had not contributed much to the conversation, although he had seemed somewhat interested and amused by it, watched her speculatively.

“Mrs. Bryce, Miss Gwynne, Clodagh,” Aunt Katie said, counting on her fingers, “you, William—," and she continued silently.

“And Miss Kingsley?” I asked timidly. It was less a suggestion than a way of introducing my governess's name into the conversation. I was worried about Miss Kingsley's fate and was seeking reassurance, and, should that not be forthcoming, then information about what might become of her. At the back of my mind, I mingled kitchen stories of eviction, famine, and death with the less dramatic but also horrifying cases for whom Aunt Katie collected subscriptions for the Irish Distressed Ladies Fund.

“An excellent suggestion,” Uncle William said, to my surprise. “Miss Kingsley. That could dilute the vulgarity level by quite a lot.”

“William,” Grandmother said faintly, as though she had not already clearly intimated that the Bryces fell short of her social standards.

“Mrs. Bryce said
pas devant
at lunch today, and Miss Kingsley said quite a lot in French. I don't think they understood her.”

Grandmother managed to purse her lips and smile at the same time. Unde William laughed.

“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, of course, and since there will be Alice and Clodagh, perhaps charlotte russe,” Aunt Katie said. “I'll write to Mrs. Bryce.”

***

“
ALICE, DEAR, YOU HAD
a bad dream last night. Do you'remember what it was about?”

It should not be inferred from my great-aunt's question that any influence emanating from Vienna had wafted west as far as Ballydavid. Nor had Aunt Katies curiosity about my dream—as would have been the case had it been Bridie asking—been in anticipation of prophetic content. She was, tentatively and euphemistically, attempting a discussion of my resumed sleepwalking, in which she hoped to learn something without telling me anything I didn't already know.

I hadn't known about the sleepwalking until that morning—it was Bridie who told me I had resumed my somnambulistic habits—but for a little time I had been having nightmares; two or three times a week I would awaken during the night so frightened that I did not dare to sit up and light my candle and I would lie immobile until the first light came through my bedroom window.

Aunt Katie had the night before, Bridie told me, come into the kitchen to reassure herself that the house had been properly locked up for the night and had found me at the back door, turning and tugging at the doorknob in an apparent attempt to leave the house. This had occurred early enough for Bridie to be still awake and for her to creep down the back stairs into the kitchen. I had not been able, Bridie said, to open the back door since it was secured with heavy bolts at both top and bottom. I wondered if this was something she should have kept to herself, or perhaps the information she imparted to my sentient waking being would be inaccessible to my sleepwalking persona if I were to make another attempt, while asleep, to leave the house.

Aunt Katie must have known that, if Bridie had seen me, my sleepwalking could no longer be kept secret, but she chose to approach the subject obliquely.

“I had a nightmare,” I said, playing the same game.

“What was it about?” she asked.

I shrugged helplessly. Had I been capable of talking about my nighttime fears I would probably have been able to stay put in my bed.

“Monsters ?” she asked. I could tell that she was uneasy about even this suggestion, torn between the possibility that she might be offering a new subject for fear and the hope that whatever disturbed me was one of the usual childhood terrors of the imagination. She could have been more convincingly dismissive of, say, witches than she could have of armed revolutionaries.

“I don't know,” I said, untruthfully.

Aunt Katie seemed almost reassured. She patted my arm.

“Something chasing you? Running away and not being able to—cry out?”

I nodded; acquiescence seemed the easiest course. My nightmares weren't abstract. They were clear and always the same, although each took its theme a little further and each was a little more specific in its details.

In my dreams I had been condemned to death. The circumstances of my life had not otherwise changed. I was not imprisoned, but I had only four days before I was to be executed. It seemed that no one could help me, and, although everyone was sympathetic to my circumstance, I never had anyone's full attention. Implicit in every one of these nightmares was the never-quite-present Countess Markievicz, who, in her beautiful pale dress, waited in a condemned cell. Roger Casement, with his ascendancy tweed suit and his saintly smile, farther away, made a less substantial member of our condemned trio.

 

UNCLE WILLIAM HAD NOT
been consulted about the placement; for a moment I thought he was going to protest under the guise of modestly pointing out that Grandmother, rather than he, should sit at the head of the table, but, after a moment's hesitation noticed by everyone except possibly Clodagh, he said nothing and pulled back chairs for Mrs. Bryce and Miss Gwynne. Mrs. Bryce sat on his right, Rosamund Gwynne on his left. Sonia and Miss Kingsley were separated from him by Aunt Katie and the dual buffer of Clodagh and me. Grandmother, far from sanguine about her lunch party, was not taking any unnecessary chances.

Uncle William carved. He did it very well; it was a skill he had learned as a senior boy at Repton. When I had first been told this—my father's brief education in New Zealand had not included such refinements—I'd imagined a classroom with a joint of beef on a large platter on every desk, behind which each boy stood with a carving knife and fork while a master at the front of the room demonstrated the proper way of carving a sirloin. It had been explained, to my disappointment, that “learning to carve” merely meant that at lunch the senior boy at each table sliced and dispensed the meat as best he could, learning by trial and error. Uncle William's performance kept him happy. I watched his preliminaries: testing the knife on the edge of his thumb, sharpening the blade noisily, and then stepping up to the sideboard and assessing the joint as though there were several schools of thought as how to approach it. Bridie stood patiently to the side, waiting to carry around the plates.

There was plenty going on and no awkward silences while Uncle William questioned our guests about whether they would prefer rare or better-done beef and gave unneeded instructions to Bridie. It meant, however, that Mrs. Bryce and Rosamund Gwynne were conversationally isolated until he sat down, with only Aunt Katie, herself preoccupied with the serving of food, to encourage small talk. Grandmother was already regretting her decision to place Miss Kingsley and Sonia to cither side of her. Sonia remained silent and sipped her wine. A small glass had been poured for each adult guest, and I saw her flick her eyes toward the sideboard to see if a second bottle stood open beside the decanters of port and brandy: None did; wine at lunch was only a token offering, the amount served about the same size as the glass of sherry each had been given in the drawing room before lunch.

Aunt Katie, who should have taken responsibility for entertaining Rosamund Gwynne at least until her stepson sat down, had instead engaged Miss Kingsley in conversation. Miss Kingsley, provided one kept off the current political and military crisis—and assuming one did not choose to steer the conversation into the dangerous waters of Sonia's expertise—was probably the easiest person to talk to at the table. But Aunt Katie, more unnerved by Rosamund Gwynne than I could have otherwise discerned, had managed nothing better than a governess anecdote. I missed her opening gambit, since I was unhappily aware that Sonia, between me and Grandmother, seemed shabbier and less substantial than ever.